As promised, I am getting back to some things people have written in response to my catechumen series. Thanks for the words of support, and prayers. I will revisit one post at a time.

On the post about the nature of the true church, David Hamstra brought up the line from Matthew 18:20: “…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” It’s a popular line with people who are not into big overarching church structures, since it sounds like church is any time you and your buddies get together for prayer or theological bull sessions. David says he sees “the role of the larger church structures as being that of supporting the gathering of twos and threes.”

It’s worth noting the context of that line: it comes at the end of an unusually detailed instruction about how to deal with disputes within church. In short, Jesus says, try to deal with things quietly, but if that fails bring it before the whole church; and if anybody doesn’t submit to the church’s judgment, “let such a one be as a Gentile or a tax collector.” On the other hand, if you agree on things you will have great power, because wherever two or three are gathered etc.

So the overall passage is not as reassuring to low-church Protestants as it might sound like in isolation. Two or three may form a congregation, but they still have to submit to the larger body when they fail to agree on something. The fact that the church has fractured because of innumerable failures to do just that complicates the initial image that any small group can declare itself to be gathering in the name of Jesus and invoke his spirit.

Jose Solano defines church even more simply as “wherever repentant sinners gather.” Again, that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot it leaves out. Lots of people repent of their sins outside of a Christian context. Buddhists do it as a general habit. Surrounding the act of repentance are the definitions of what should be repented of, and how, and to whom. Jesus made it clear, as I said above, that failing to submit to church authority is a sin, which winds us back to the question of who has that legitimate authority. So that is sort of an answer that presumes a conclusion.

I am reading Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God now, which is all about this subject, so I think I’ll hold off further comment until I’m finished.

Thanks for all the supportive comments to my last post, as well as the encouragement to keep writing about it. It might jog me out of the languid once-a-week-if-that pattern of blogging I’ve fallen into lately.

I left off mentioning that I was initially drawn into Christianity by the “evangelical catholic” approach of the Duke school, and that I remain attached to it even though I see its potential problems. When I think back to when I first encountered it three and a half years ago, I think a lot of what appealed to me was the way it positioned the Christian community in relation to the state and the culture at large. This is one area where it borrowed heavily from the Mennonites, and so it takes a position of more “apartness” from both those entities than more mainstream traditions have.

Why does this matter to me? There are a lot of reasons, but when I think about it I realize I shouldn’t underestimate the impact on me of growing up in the shadow of the counterculture. To be born in the U.S. in 1971 is to come into a nation in deep conflict with itself. To grow up in the San Francisco area is to live practically in ground zero of that conflict.

My parents’ attitude toward the counterculture was always ambivalent. Neither one of them remembered the ’50s with any sort of nostalgia — my mother, especially, didn’t like being female in that environment — so they were not terribly bothered that the old order changed. But neither one of them really participated in it either. My mother did a civil-rights march or two, but for the most part they lived conventional upper-middle-class lives. Probably the biggest way it affected them was somewhat indirect: that they eventually divorced and my mother later moved in with a man without marrying him. That probably wouldn’t have happened to a family like mine before the ’60s, but it’s not “counterculture” per se.

Anyway, I grew up with this similar sense of belonging neither to the counterculture nor what was quaintly called the Establishment. To some extent in Marin in the ’70s and ’80s the counterculture was the establishment, as perhaps epitomized by my high-school chemistry teacher who used to play his Grateful Dead tapes in the background during labs. I always sympathized with the ideals of the counterculture but I was also always kind of square, especially in the compared to the libertinism that filtered down to the second generation.

My sense of alienation from both sides of the culture war increased after 9/11. I think now that it was no coincidence at all that my interest in Christianity flared up while America was in its post-9/11 fever dream. And I think when I was reading Telford describing the Duke school’s ecclesial vision of Christians as a community within the culture but not of it, honoring the authorities and guardians of earth but placing their faith only in the authorities and guardians of heaven, I saw what the counterculture should have been, the pieces it had been missing all along that made me unable to really believe in it. To bring Jesus into the picture gave order and shape to the counterculture’s fuzzy utopianism; replaced its self-indulgence with discipline; replaced the mandate to re-engineer society with a trust in the direction of history; excised the sex and drugs and romanticizing of Communist thugs. Going to PMC made this vision more concrete. I remember saying to somebody after I went there that seeing a church full of people who were so much like the ones I grew up around, and yet profoundly different, told me that my subculture could also be redeemed by Christ.

Of course, all this personal history raises the question of how much I’m actually seeing some transcendent truth, and how much I’m still trying to impress the folks back home. I have to admit that even though what I’m doing is a pretty radical thing to my family, I can see a lot of ways that being a Mennonite serves to justify me to the elders and peers of my youth. It’s a way of saying I’m still cool even though I don’t do drugs and sleep around, that I have political principles even though I feel mostly at sea in worldly politics, that I’m intellectual even though I’ve always had this flighty mystical streak. The Christianity of old Europe, that largely built the Establishment in the first place, would not accomplish all this; neither would completely checking out of Western culture and joining a convent in Korea, for instance. How much of all this is about God, and how much about me and my personal issues?

One thing that’s been interesting about meeting Christians of various stripes, however, is that I’ve seen how not only Mennonites feel this way. Even people in the oldest of churches seem to feel that being a Christian in America is to be at once both culture and counterculture. Conservative evangelicals insist that America is a Christian nation yet feel constantly beleaguered by mainstream culture. Catholics are the biggest single sect in the world but they watch both political leaders and average citizens ignore the exhortations of their popes. And despite the commanding Christian majority in America, anyone who opts out of premarital sex or abortion or general consumerism is going to feel themselves swimming against the cultural tide.

That’s the peculiar paradox of “tradition” in our society: the whole idea of tradition, of the unbroken chain that passes along social values through the collective unconscious, has become impossible. Even “traditional values” have become a conscious pose, things to be adopted and defended rather than received. Maggie Gallagher pointed this out in writing about the crunch cons:

There is something movingly pathetic in watching the Drehers drive through different religious identities, for example, searching for one that “fits.” Worshipping at a Lebanese Maronite (Catholic) Church, for example, because they like the taste of ancient tradition, even if they are neither Lebanese nor Maronite. Tradition itself becomes a kind of consumption item, to be produced and consumed by crunchy cons.

A true traditionalism would not be represented by people who move to Dallas, buy a nice bungalow and invite friends over for tasty organic cooked food. It would be led by people who advocate returning to the place you were born, where your kith and kin also live, because that is really where you belong, the thing in which your very self is rooted.

One reason Rod cannot do this, by his own account, is that he doesn’t have any such native tradition.

Neither do I. I can’t go back to where kith and kin live, because they no longer live in one place. And so no matter what I do (as Lee pointed out in a comment to my last post), I cannot be traditional. I can’t just receive a tradition; I have to decide what I believe. And this goes for church as much as anything else. A while ago I linked to an article in which Rusty Reno found himself in exactly that logical pretzel: he developed a theory as to why he should not assert his sovereign individualism by leaving his church, and then he realized that staying there was really being loyal only to the theory he’d developed. No matter what he did, there was no escaping the position of standing in judgment over any church’s doctrine.

All of this is a long way of saying that if Jesus has the power to redeem us traditionless people at all, it makes sense that he would redeem through the counterculture rather than expecting Western society to somehow repent of the whole thing and pick up as if nothing had happened. And I do derive some comfort from the fact that the first Christians probably felt the same way. That’s also why I sympathize with evangelical catholics’ belief that the church of ancient Rome provides a more useful model today than the medieval vision of a timeless natural social order. I think Yoder had a point that even where the New Testament seems to be declaring such an order, as in Romans 13 and Ephesians 5, it raises the question of why it is being declared in the first place. It goes against the nature of received traditions to spell them out like that; they should be simply assumed. More likely, then, those words were consciously posed against something else, and therefore cannot be removed from the stream of time and context.

As to what they were being posed against, well, there are a lot of theories about that. But certainly I feel that church’s position more than the church whose leaders anointed kings (and were often related to them), or churches who feel America once belonged to them and they have to take it back.

Oy, it’s been a rough Lent so far. I’ve been sick for a lot of it, though now I’m finally starting to feel human again. I gave up alcohol, which has proven to be much harder than last year’s discipline of going vegan. But probably what’s stressing me out the most is thinking about baptism.

I’ve had this vague intention, maybe more like a hope, that I would get baptized this Eastertide. Easter is the traditional time to do it, and so it became a sort of informal goal. I’ve even idly fantasized about how I’d like to do it, whom I’d invite, and that sort of thing. (This being an Anabaptist rite, there is some flexibility on this.) But the arrival of Lent has made this much more immediate, and brought on the need for some serious preparation. And it’s raised a lot of stuff I’ve been kind of avoiding.

As the few people who’ve been reading my blog from the beginning would know, I’ve changed a huge amount in the last three-plus years. I started out as a curious skeptic about Christianity, and now I sound indistinguishable from a Christian — indeed, sometimes I hear myself sounding downright dogmatic. But when it comes to it, my persona on this blog does not tell the whole story. I’ve had doubts about a lot of things, and I still have them. Some of it relates to personal matters that I don’t want to discuss here; but perhaps it will help me to discuss what I can. (Since there’s more than one issue going on, maybe this will turn into a series.)

One perpetual question I have, which I have sometimes brought up here, is: what is the true church? This an important question for a lot of reasons. For one thing, although the baptismal question of whether I accept Jesus as my lord and savior (or however Mennonites put it) seems like a straightforward yes-or-no option, the underlying question is exactly who this Jesus is that I commit myself to. Since I don’t know him personally, and since the Bible is too sketchy and weird to form a complete picture (sorry, sola scriptura fans), I need the help of some interpretive tradition. And this seems to be the way Jesus meant for it to be. As Lesslie Newbigin pointed out: “Jesus in his ministry took no steps to provide a written body of teaching. He created a community which would be enabled by the Spirit, after his death and resurrection, to grow into an ever fuller understanding of him and his message, and so to live as children in his Father’s house.”

The second reason is that, as the Lutheran hymn goes, “We are standing on the promises of God.” The church, as Christ’s bride, received a specific set of promises from Jesus; that his spirit would always been with her, that the gates of hell shall not prevail, etc. That doesn’t mean that no one outside the church can receive God’s protection or spirit actions — even in the Bible this happens — but the church is the only entity (after Israel) that actually gets a guarantee.

Of course, you’re going to get a lot of different opinions about what the true church is. Because I was brought into Christianity in the first place by Telford and the Duke mafia, I’ve mostly been exposed to the belief that the true church is actually the whole body of Christendom, sadly fractured but still the Bride. (Newbigin, whom I quoted earlier, was one of the big proponents of this.) I’ve long had trouble with this idea because it creates and image of God that’s so incoherent. I wrote about this at some length here (and now that I look back on it, I see I was already thinking about it in terms of baptism). I think there are some internal conflicts with the Duke school’s “evangelical catholicism”, as they call it, mainly that it defends a sort of Great Tradition view of the church while hewing to some positions that are definitely in the minority as far as tradition is concerned, like pacifism and women’s ordination.

One way to square this problem is to simply go with the “catholic” side of that argument, and say that the only valid church is one that can trace its existence all the way back to Jesus. There’s a lot to be said for that, especially given the promises from Jesus to the church that I mentioned earlier. I don’t give much credence to long-dead sects like Gnosticism or Arianism, however amusing it might be to defend them from what textual evidence there is, simply because God’s promises don’t mean much of anything if he lets his bride die off like that. A similar difficulty comes up with claims that seem to have the true church disappearing for centuries at a time, only to reappear at the Reformation or even later. Somehow, those sorts of claims make God less trustworthy, less like our adoptive father and more like an elusive, shifty character testing people to see if they’re smart enough to ferret him out of the alleged distortions of the mainstream tradition. I don’t see much support for such code-hunting in the texts themselves, however. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, not the clever.

Still, the “continuists” have their own problems. There are at least two churches that can plausibly trace their history back to Jesus — more, if you count the eastern monophysite sects (and I don’t see why not). And while God may seem less trustworthy if he is hiding within texts, there are also obvious trust issues with a God who allows the sort of corruptions and abuses within his church that led to the Reformation to begin with.

For me, I think the problem is that there are just some things in those churches that I can’t swallow. I don’t expect to be convinced of Jesus’ divinity as an objective fact, so part of my baptismal query to myself is more subjective: is this who I want to follow? Is this what my soul tells me is Truth? The evangelical catholic view, though I see its flaws, is still what drew me, and I am loath to give it up. In my next posts, I’ll go into some specific issues to explain what I mean.

Lee agrees with my overall points in the last post, but added in a comment:

I don’t know that infant baptism per se is the problem (but then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?). Rather, I think it’s that too many churches fail to provide the kind of nurture that helps people “grow into” their baptism. My worry about an exclusive insistence on “believer’s baptism” is that it can tend to make faith into something that we do, with baptism merely an symbol of the ineffable, inward reality of faith. And that always raises the question, Do I really, truly have faith? In the more sacramental churches baptism is understood as an act of God’s grace – which is always prior to anything we may do in response.

I see his point. But I must admit I’ve been feeling pretty down on infant baptism lately, since my mother brought me my father’s confirmation Bible. My father is an atheist, and his parents didn’t really believe in God either, but they had him baptized and confirmed to please his Episcopalian grandparents. It made my father all the more hostile to religion, since the whole thing was so stupid and pointless. So the Bible sat unread on the shelf for all these decades until my mother was cleaning stuff out, and figured I would be the best person to have it, since I’m into that stuff.

I’m glad she gave it to me but it makes me sad every time I look at it. This is how a family’s faith dies: it declines with each generation until only a few rituals are left, which eventually aren’t even worth doing. I like ritual, normally, but there’s hardly anything more depressing than an empty one. I guess this is how the first Protestants felt, and I understand their anger.

Still, doing away with rituals doesn’t invariably solve the problem, since creating rituals and then emptying them seems to be such a common human sin. The Internet Monk has complained extensively how in his Baptist tradition a teenage decision for Christ — which these days, is more often expressed by an altar call than by baptism — is taken to make someone a perpetual Christian even in the total absence of discipleship. So renewal movements keep coming along, and keep being needed, but I suppose they are all in some sense concessions to sin.

Moving on (somewhat belatedly) to other happenings on my trip: as Jennifer mentioned we went to a Sunday evening service at Tripp’s church plant, Church of Jesus Christ, Reconciler. It was my first visit to a bona fide house church (well, apartment church, technically speaking), and the congregation of ten was apparently the biggest they’d yet seen.

Reconciler is an ecumenical effort, co-pastored by Tripp, an Episcopal minister, and an Evangelical Covenant pastor. The attendees included a middle-aged man from a nearby Mennonite intentional community, but it was mostly a young, hip group. The EC pastor, with his goatee, black garb and pink-haired wife, accurately embodied his blog address of “priestly goth.” But the attitude of the service was highly liturgical and serious, showing more Episcopalian influence than the low-church origins of two of its pastors might suggest. (The fact that Larry was wearing a clerical collar suggests he has higher-church aspirations, since I’ve never seen an EC pastor wear anything other than street clothes.) Still, there were populist touches: the host was passed around the group rather than administered entirely by the pastor(s), and right after the sermon came a discussion of the sermon, in which Larry’s wife disputed one of Jane’s points.

We used the hymnal from Tripp’s church, North Shore Baptist. I’d never seen a Baptist hymnal before, but it actually included some songs that I knew from the Lutheran church and from PMC. Both Jennifer and I were amused by one difference: the song categories, which normally include functions such as Gathering, Sending, Communion and so on, also had a category called “Invitations/Warnings.” Neither Methodists nor Lutherans would call songs “Warnings,” even when they are.

The idea of healing denominational divisions in this way is interesting, although especially after my visit to the Church of Christ I know that such efforts have only tended to create new factions. I’ve been thinking about ecumenicism a lot lately, in fact, and was needling everybody about it on the trip, and have been needling others since then. (This is what happens when I get a theological fixation.) I have been thinking not so much about the relations between Christianity and other faiths, but how Christian denominations view each other.

Historically speaking, every denomination has viewed itself as the True Church, and other churches as false. But in modern times most moderate-to-liberal Protestants seem to have moved toward a more ecumenical view that all Christian churches (with debatable fringe cases like the Mormons) belong to the Body of Christ. Telford wrote his own version of this here. In fact, it seems fairly common for Protestants to feel offended at the idea that anyone would think them not a Christian. Just today I met a guy at the post-church lunch group who was so perpetually annoyed at the Amish for their exclusivity, and thinking him not a real Christian, that he said he would be happy to get in a barfight with one. (I will leave the unpacking of the multiple ironies of that remark as an exercise for the reader.) My Lutheran pastor, while less crude, was also offended when a Catholic I knew declined to take part in something, since it was self-evident that they “worship the same God.”

But do they? I suppose it depends on how you define God. If you go by a minimal set of propositions, such as the Apostle’s Creed or just “Jesus is Lord,” then I suppose they do worship the same God. But from the beginning of my search probably my greatest preoccupation has been with the character of God, and the impression of God’s character that I get from the different denominations is often very different. So much so, in fact, that I do not think I could follow God as defined by some churches.

So the differences in doctrine don’t (usually) seem to me like airy abstractions detached from Christian life. To the extent that they shed light on God’s character, they are right in the heart of the matter. A few years back I remember a discussion on predestination on Disputations, which I’m not going to try to dig up now, that wound up with somebody asking what difference it all really made. Tom answered something to the effect of, “You become what you love, and if you love the Calvinist God, then you become, for better or worse, a Calvinist.” Graham seems to be making basically the same point here.

Since all most of us know about God is basically what we read and hear about him, it seems inevitable that people form a mental image of him the same way they do a fictional character. And just as you may go to a movie version of a book and find characters realized in ways you never would have thought of, Christians look at each other and see very different impressions of God developed from the same material. So if a Catholic or an Amishman or a Southern Baptist or whatever tells you that you don’t worship the same God as he does, he may be bigoted or self-righteous; or he may just be honest.

It’s here, I think, that the Catholics and the Orthodox have their best case that the church plays a crucial role in conveying the nature of God, and indeed without the church we would never know or care anything about Jesus. Protestants carry the burden of proof in explaining why the traditional magesterium is inadequate — even more so when Protestants themselves can’t agree on the matter.

Wyman Richardson had an interesting series of posts recently on “Baptist Paleo-Orthodoxy”, which is apparently an attempt to connect Baptists to a sort of Christian Great Tradition. It’s in parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. Along the way, he acknowledges the difficulty of being passionately attached to some doctrine that has historically been in the minority — in his case believer baptism, but speaking for myself I could add pacifism, as well as a non-Dantean image of the afterlife.

What I’ve been wondering, particularly about myself, is: how much do these attachments stem from a belief that they must be true, and how much from a feeling that you couldn’t bring yourself to worship God if they were not true? This is essentially the difference between the propositional approach and the characterological approach to faith that I described above. The former is more logical, the latter emotional.

As I look at the question of my own baptism, I see that my own faith falls heavily in the latter camp. I am with the Mennonites because I want to follow their God, not because I think they present the most rationally convincing case that God is that way. Hell, if I were being entirely rational I’d still be an agnostic, despite all of Telford’s valiant apologetics. In the circles I hang in propositionalism isn’t particularly admired, but I can also see how a belief in the factuality of things like the Apostle’s Creed makes faith more than wishful thinking. The martyrs, I think, stood not only on their principles but their conviction that ultimate reality was on their side.

This is drifting a ways from ecumenicism, but I think this is lying beneath my growing discomfort with facile ecumenical claims. The responsibility to love one’s neighbor goes beyond the bounds of the Church, so I don’t propose that Christians ought to start burning each other again. I guess I’d just like the churches to take a bit more responsibility for publicly defining the character of God. It seems to me that until there is more agreement on that question, such laudable efforts as Reconciler are doomed to failure.